Ontologies
Business enterprises often need to create ontologies, in order for people, databases, and applications to share information within a certain domain. In these cases, an ontology is represented as a machine-readable set of terms that describe details of the domain. Having an ontology in a machine-readable format allows an enterprise to make full use of ontology methodologies and tools.
Example of an Ontology
A simple but useful ontology might describe a domain consisting of an organization's employees, employee teams, and departments. Relationships between employees and teams, employees and departments, and the set of properties that characterize employees, teams, and departments can be fully described by an ontology. This ontology could be represented in an electronic, machine-readable format—for example, in the NTriple format or one of the OWL (Web Ontology Language) dialects.
Advantages of Using an Ontology
The benefits of an organization or enterprise using such an ontology include:                Having a better conceptual and intellectual relationship to the data described in the domain;        Using established ontology tools for reading, writing, and inferring more data described in the domain;        Ease of sharing and integrating data with other parties using the same or similar domain;        Developing software applications that use and write data within the domain; and        Being able to easily modify/extend the domain description by updating the ontology.        
Many of the valuable usages of ontologies require the ontology to be represented as ontology description artifacts in a standard, machine-readable ontology format, such as NTriple or one of the OWL dialects.
Prior Techniques for Creating Ontologies
Until now, ontology description artifacts have been produced in a number of ways:                Programmatically using an ontology API;        Using a GUI ontology editor; or        By hand-writing text files using XML (Extended Markup Language), in the case of producing OWL, for example, or some other description language.Programmatically Using an Ontology API        
For programmatically using an ontology API, such as Jena, software has to be written, which is costly and requires programming expertise as well as expertise in the API being employed.
Using a GUI Ontology Editor
Software tools such as Protégé or Altova have been created to partially facilitate the process of generating ontologies. For example, Protégé is a well-known GUI ontology editor, and Jena is a Java based framework that facilitates processing and constructing ontologies programmatically. This method requires familiarity with the specific editor to be used.
Hand-Writing Text Files Using XML
Programmers have used simple XML codes and other description languages to create machine-readable ontologies. This is the most cumbersome prior technique of those mentioned: it requires intimate familiarity with the description language being used and is prone to typos and other mistakes.
In summary, these prior techniques are typically complicated to use and require experts that are familiar with ontologies and related concepts to perform them, making them time consuming and therefore expensive. They require a significant degree of familiarity with ontology description languages such as OWL, which makes it hard for domain experts and business analysts to contribute to ontology data without first becoming versed in new, relatively complex standards.
Therefore there is a need for a faster and more user-friendly way to go about producing such ontology descriptions without having to use special experts.